Check out this craaaaazy story!

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1243205.ece

I encountered AD Harvey's Warriors of the Rainbow a few years ago, and it was memorably bad, but it's still tempting to read it again now that I've read this article.

Oh darn, you beat me to it. I kept reading and reading thinking Borges meets lolcats but by the time I finished it was bedtime, and the next thing I know here you are.

Wasn't it great? Truly rabbit holes inside rabbit holes...

How brilliant that such people exist in this world. A tour de force of self delusion.

For some reason the name g... r.... kept popping up in my head...

Edited as mac was right to say it was naughty. But that name did pop up clearly in my head as I read...

3 LOL , that's naughty

Brillant piece, txs martini for sharing

By the way, have we talked at all about the conversation Melville had with Dickens during Dickens visit to the US?

awesome article! I love these kind of hoaxes.
I hate to say I told you so, but when that story first came out I was a bit puzzled, coz I never heard of Dosty visiting Dickens. It doesn't appear in his letters, and it's not in Frank, or Mochulsky. I'm sure Dostoevsky would have written about it in his journal of his visit to England: Winter NOtes on Summer Impressions, but there's no mention of it there. Anyway. this hoaxter is pretty professional and imaginative. My hat off to him.

so sam, what did they talk about about?

I would also like to know what Stalin and Andre Gide talked about at Gorky's funeral.

The first thing I did after finishing that article was to check that Eric Naiman really existed - then I checked that A. D. Harvey really existed ...

If I let it get to me there could be no end to it.

They talked about energy and technology; Melville explained the benefits of spermacetti with it's remarkably clean burning, and Dickens talked of the soot of the coal fires as the countryside was literally burned to feed the cities.

It is good we know what Proust and Joyce were speaking about when they finally met.
Proust was complaining about his poor health. Joyce wanted a new pair of shoes and if possible a new coat.

This is so "real life" that it can only be true...

Hemingway and Steinbeck, when in the same room at the same reception hardly spoke to each other.

Encounters at parties are subject to the vagaries of memory, and further obscured by layers of gossip and hearsay and inaudibility, the whole mix invariably transformed even more by alcohol. So it is unsurprising that the Proust/Joyce exchange should be related in at least seven different ways:

1) As told by Joyce’s friend Arthur Power:
proust: Do you like truffles?
joyce: Yes, I do.

2) As told by the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre:

proust: I have never read your works, Mr Joyce.
joyce: I have never read your works, Mr Proust.†

3) As told by James Joyce many years later to Jacques Mercanton:
‘Proust would talk only of duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids.’

4) As told by James Joyce to his close friend Frank Budgen:
‘Our talk consisted solely of the word “No”. Proust asked me if I knew the duc de so-and-so. I said, “No.” Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of Ulysses. Proust said, “No.” And so on. Of course the situation was impossible. Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.’

5) According to another friend of Joyce, Padraic Clum, Joyce wants to undermine the Schiifs’ hopes for a legendary occasion, so tries to stay as silent as possible:
proust: Ah, Monsieur Joyce, you know the Princess …
joyce: No, Monsieur.
proust: Ah, you know the Countess …
joyce: No, Monsieur.
proust: Then you know Madame …
joyce: No, Monsieur.
However, in this version, Joyce clearly wrong-foots himself, as his silence becomes part of the legend.

6) As told by William Carlos Williams:
joyce: I’ve had headaches every day. My eyes are terrible.
proust: My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me.
In fact, I must leave at once.
joyce: I’m in the same situation. If I can find someone to take me by the arm. Goodbye!
proust: Charmé. Oh, my stomach.

7) As told by Ford Madox Ford:
proust: As I say, Monsieur, in Du Côté de chez Swann, which without doubt you have –
joyce: No, Monsieur.
(pause)
joyce: As Mr Bloom says in my Ulysses, which, Monsieur, you have doubtless read …
proust: But, no, Monsieur.
(pause)
Proust apologises for his late arrival, ascribing it to malady, before going into the symptoms in some detail.
joyce: Well, Monsieur, I have almost exactly the same symptoms.
Only in my case, the analysis …

And from then on, for a number of hours, the two men discuss their various illnesses.

According to Schiff, who has a leaning towards accuracy, the party ends with Proust inviting the Schiffs back to his apartment, and with Joyce squeezing into the taxi too. Joyce then starts smoking, and opens the window, causing upset to Proust, an asthmatic who hates fresh air. In the brief journey, Proust talks incessantly, but addresses none of his remarks to Joyce.

When the four of them alight in rue Hamelin, Joyce tries to join the others in Proust’s apartment, but they do their best to divert him. ‘Let my taxi take you home,’ insists Proust, before disappearing upstairs with Violet Schiff, leaving Sydney Schiff to bundle Joyce back into the taxi. Free of Joyce’s company at last, Proust and the Schiffs drink champagne and talk merrily until daybreak.

* Proust’s handshake lacks vigour. ‘There are many ways of shaking hands. It is not too much to say that it is an art. He was not good at it. His hand was soft and drooping … There was nothing pleasant about the way he performed the action,’ writes his friend Prince Antoine Bibesco. Joyce’s right hand is another matter. When a young man comes up to him in Zürich and says, ‘May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’ Joyce replies, ‘No – it did a lot of other things too.’
† Some maintain this dialogue cannot be accurate, as Joyce tells a friend in 1920 that he has read ‘some pages’ of Proust, adding, ‘I cannot see any special merit but I am a bad critic.’ But Joyce can be perverse like this: on meeting Wyndham Lewis, he pretends not to have read his work, though he definitely has.

From Hello Goodbye Hello by Craig Brown. Copyright © 2011 by Craig Brown. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

If you keep going on like this, I will have to tell you about the time I introduced David Foster Wallace to Thomas Pynchon.

Well if the story is good enough, i'll buy you a beer

What about the time g... r.... met Alexander Theroux?

Sorry, I'm missing the g.... r..... reference and need a hint or something...

(I don't actually know either)

I know.

gene ruyles omg the attack of the bouffant hairdo!

OH YEAH THAT GUY!!!! I miss him.

Thanks 18, I needed that!